As We Wait For The Pro Gym Challenge, Let's Watch Evolution

With the Pro Gym Challenge set to air on ESPN tomorrow (and hopefully it will appear on YouTube soon for people like me who don't get the US version of ESPN) I thought it would be good to have a look at the predecessor which was called Evolution. The Pro Gym Challenge have put up a version of Evolution on their YouTube account which you can watch below. Unfortunately the videos seem to stop right before the end so we don't get to find out who won, but nevertheless it was really good to watch. I wasn't sure how this format would work as previously all I knew is that it was skill-for-skill, but with no idea how it would be scored. However, it turned out to be really good. The way it works is that one team gets to choose a skill to do and gets someone to perform it, the other team then has to perform the same skill and the team that does it best gets a point and also gets to choose the next skill. At the end of each apparatus the winner for that apparatus was the team with the most points. It looks like the final winner was decided as the team that won the most apparatus, although the videos don't show the ending. Personally I think it would have been better to accumulate the scores over all events (like in the all-around), nevertheless the scoring still worked quite well, although it could easily lead to 'dead' events if one team gets enough points before the final event. With the inclusion of the rope climb there were 6 events, so once a team gets to 4 they would be unbeatable making any remaining events meaningless. However, it was really good that they showed the scores in the corner of the screen and this is something that should be adopted for more competitions.

Overall, the competition was easy to follow and you could see exactly how each team was going, each skill had meaning and you could see how it contributed to the score. The competition also flowed really well as there wasn't a lot of waiting around for the judges. It was also quite exciting seeing what skills the gymnasts could come up with and to see if the other team could match it.

Evolution also had a few apparatus that are not normally seen. These included the single rail for women's bars (to make it more like men's high bar) and the rope climb. The single rail was cool, but the rope climb was a bit silly and hopefully it doesn't hang around. The competition attire was much also better than in a normal competition, especially for the men, who badly need to get rid of leotards.

The biggest con of the event was the time. Although the YouTube videos go for approximately 1 hour and 45 minutes, the actual competition took nearly 4 hours. It sounds like part of the problem was the need to change the apparatus after every event, so the setup might need some tweaking. You could also reduce the time taken by reducing the number of skills per event. I think 1.5 to 2 hours would be the ideal length and certainly it should not be longer than 2 hours.

I'm a bit undecided on the music that was playing. Many competitions have background music playing that just doesn't fit with the gymnastics being performed and often detracts from the competition (sometimes it is so bad I even have to hit mute), but in Evolution it actually worked quite well and complemented many of the skills being performed. On the other hand I love it when the crowd gets involved and roars when someone hits a routine or gasps during a release move, so I think the atmosphere could be worked on to allow for the crowd noise to really contribute to the competition.

The bigger question is how can this format integrate into the gymnastics calendar. Overall there is probably plenty of room in the year for such a format as gymnastics fans are starved of good competitions to watch and outside the top few gymnasts in the world there really aren't enough competitions for the gymnasts to participate in, with the exception being NCAA gymnasts, so it would be great to see more competition opportunities appear. Maybe we could look to cricket which has 3 different formats which it manages to integrate into it's calendar. Could a skill-for-skill format work like the IPL where a month or two is dedicated to this format? This format would certainly work well in a 'league' format where each team gets to compete against all the other teams in the league.